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Timothy Carney

Re-elected, Obama takes aim at religious liberty

So, people have First Amendment protections as long as they don’t start businesses. If they do, and if they operate their businesses according with their own consciences, they “become laws unto themselves,” as the Obama administration puts it.

So this is who the Left has in mind when it says conservatives are trying to legislate morality: people who dare to follow their moral and religious beliefs, as opposed to a code devised by bureaucrats regulating a secular state.

If people want to adhere to their faith, they best stay quiet about it. The liberal commentariat made that clear this past election season.

“I’m tired of religious groups operating secular enterprises (hospitals, schools),” writer Kevin Drum fumed in the liberal Mother Jones, “hiring people of multiple faiths, serving the general public, taking taxpayer dollars — and then claiming that deeply held religious beliefs should exempt them from public policy.”